"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion— they cannot understand destitution. Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves bare, they will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them." Léon Bloy

17 June 2015

Wall St Pleads For More Government Subsidies and Handouts In NYT Op-Ed

"It was the incarnation of blind insensate Greed. It was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs: it was The Great Butcher — it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh."

Upton Sinclair

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."

Wall Street Front Group Pleads for Government Help in New York Times OpEd

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

June 17, 2015

After the U.S. government pumped the secret, astronomical sum of more than $13 trillion into Wall Street during the years surrounding the 2008 financial crisis to bail it out of its own greedy and reckless gambles, Wall Street is shamelessly asking for more government handouts in the opinion pages of the New York Times. The woman pitching this pathetic poppycock, Kathryn S. Wylde, was actually on the Board of Directors at the New York Fed during the crisis – the very institution that sluiced the secret $13 trillion into Wall Street’s coffers.

If you live outside of New York City, you’ve never heard of the Partnership for New York City. Even if you live inside New York City, unless you’re part of the black tie cocktail circuit, you’ve still never heard of the group. So when the New York Times gave a chunk of its opinion pages on Monday to Wylde as President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City to plead for government help for Wall Street, it really needed to do the ethical thing and fess up that this is a brazen front group for the financial services industry...

One sharp-eyed New Yorker caught this red flag in Wylde’s pitch in the New York Times when she was spinning how vital Wall Street is to the city’s economy. Wylde wrote:

“All told, the [financial services] industry accounts for 62 percent of private-sector wages in the city, and more than one-third of its $700 billion annual economic output. It contributes about $8 billion a year in city taxes — equivalent to the combined budgets of the city’s police, fire and sanitation departments — and one-quarter ($2.5 billion) of personal income taxes.”

A comment was posted by “David H” noting the following interesting math in the above:

“According to Ms. Wylde, the financial industry accounts for 62 percent of private-sector wages in the city, but only one quarter of personal income taxes. This strikes me as an empirical basis for a very different op-ed.”

Kelly Boling of Hudson, New York commented along the same lines:

“Let’s indeed invest in the infrastructure needed to keep New York globally competitive–and pay for it by requiring financial service executives to pay taxes on their incomes and capital gains at rates equal to the effective tax rates paid by New York’s middle class.”

...This shameless propaganda piece, in drag as an OpEd from some civic organization, was titled: “Yes, Wall Street Needs Help.” We certainly agree. But it’s more along the lines of psychiatric help for having the temerity to ask for a handout for its billionaires when the Coalition for the Homeless reports that the number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping in municipal shelters is 72 percent higher than a decade ago and has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression; when there are an estimated 1.3 million children and teens enrolled in public schools across the U.S. who are homeless – an 85 percent increase since the start of the Wall Street recession; and when Wall Street even gets tax perks to ghoulishly and secretly collect billions of dollars each year on the tragic deaths of workers...

Do not be surprised if there is another financial crisis, and the Banks come back again with a long list of demands, threatening chaos and despair if they are not swiftly granted all that they desire, either openly or secretively. Why wouldn't they?

Remember Jesse's Law.

Since money is power, the greater the concentration of money in a society, the greater will be the concentration of power. And therefore the less free and broadly productive it will be, and the more inclined that this power will be to narrowly private abuses.

Unregulated greed will rise to exceed and eventually overwhelm all rational expectations of theoretical market behavior because men are not angels. And further, there is a determined minority in any society that is given over to irrational behavior and pathological obsessions that delights in abusing reason and rules, even to their own eventual destruction.

Rational expectations, and therefore market and social forces and their models, will fail when undermined by the unbridled greed for money and power.

Le Propriétaire

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Need Little - Want Less - Love More

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"A credibility trap is when the managerial functions of a society have been sufficiently compromised by corruption so that the leadership cannot reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without implicating a broad swath of the powerful, including themselves.

The moneyed interests and their aspirants tolerate the corruption because they have profited from it, and would like to continue to do so. Discipline is maintained by various forms of soft financial rewards and career and social coercion."

These are personal observations about the economy and the markets. In providing information, I hope this allows you to make your own decisions in an informed manner, even if it is from learning by my mistakes, which are many. As a standing policy I never provide individual investment advice to anyone. I will only occasionally disclose my personal positions for purposes of illustration. Understand that my own circumstances could differ greatly from your own, and therefore what is suitable for me may not be suitable for you. My comments are intended to be reflection on general macro financial and economic events and trends.